Social Democrat, Cooperative Member, and Jew. Joseph Berkowitz Kohn’s Activism in Late 19th Century Hamburg

Source Description

Joseph Berkowitz Kohn’s
“memoirs” give an account of the eventful life of a Jew born in the
Polish town
of Leczyca in
1841 who participated in various struggles for emancipation in his
homeland. In 1863
Berkowitz Kohn was
forced to flee Poland and went to Hamburg, where he set
up his own business as a merchant. Beginning in the mid-1870s, he became active in the Social
Democratic Party and especially in cooperatives. He became a well-respected
personality within Hamburg’s labor movement. Joseph Berkowitz Kohn died
in Hamburg in
1905. This short excerpt from the text, which is
about 100 pages long, is based on the diary he kept during the last three
decades of his life for his ten children and their descendants. Originally not
intended for publication, his notes were copied on a type writer by his daughter
Sophie. This typescript was given to the
Museum der Arbeit in
Hamburg,
presumably by Inge Henker, a distant relative
of Berkowitz Kohn. In
2006
Ulrich Bauche and Gertrud Pickhahn published
an annotated edition of his memoirs based on this version.Gertrud Pickhan /
Ulrich Bauche (eds.), Joseph Berkowitz Kohn, Erinnerungen. Ein Leben als
polnischer Freiheitskämpfer und hamburgischer Sozialdemokrat, 1841–1905,
Hamburg et al. 2006.

Caught between Judaism and the Polish fight for
independence

Berkowitz Kohn begins
his autobiographical text with a detailed description of his birth place, the
Polish town
of Leczyca, in
which Jews represented slightly more than half of the population in the
mid-19th century. He
stemmed from a family of merchants. The ethnic diversity of his home town
informed his intellectual and political interests, which were to revolve around
policies toward minorities, social solidarity, and national emancipation. In
addition, the importance of education in Berkowitz Kohn’s family
environment strongly influenced his further path in life. For example, he
recounts receiving an atlas of the world as a Bar Mitzvah gift and thereupon became determined
to see the world for himself.

In addition to his native Yiddish, he learned Hebrew as well as the language(s)
of his environment and the major European nations. According to his own account,
he first wrote his journal in Hebrew before writing passages in French, Polish,
and finally in German. As a young adult, he extensively studied the three
partitions of Poland since the end of the 18th century, which had led to the complete disappearance
of any sovereign Polish national state. During meetings of secret patriotic
associations, he passed on his knowledge as a basis for Polish national
patriotism. He also took part in the next armed revolt against Tsarist Russia in 1863/64. Frequent
scenes of fraternization between Poles and Jews could not hide the wide-spread,
Catholic-inspired AntisemitismBerkowitz Kohn had
been confronted with since his childhood. After the revolt was brutally put down
by Russian
troops, Berkowitz Kohn
decided to flee. He first traveled to BydgoszczBromberg via GdanskDanzig and ToruńThorn. An acquaintance of his father’s advised him
to go to Hamburg, not least because one of Berkowitz Kohn’s cousins
lived there. He eventually arrived in Hamburg on April 20, 1864.

Escape to Hamburg. Life as a merchant

At the time of his arrival, Hamburg experienced an economic boom. The population had
increased to more than 250,000 inhabitants, roughly four percent among them of
Jewish origin. The Jewish
congregation numbered about 12,500 members and had the authority
to independently decide on residence permits for (mostly eastern European)
migrants. Two of its members, whom he does not mention by name, vouched for
Berkowitz Kohn.
Finding employment proved difficult for him, however. For a time, he had to make
a living selling lottery tickets, like his cousin. It was his cousin, too, who
showed Berkowitz KohnHamburg’s
various facets and neighborhoods when he first came to the city. He was
simultaneously fascinated by its vibrant life and disgusted by the vices
previously unknown to him, such as prostitution. He witnessed great poverty in
the working class neighborhoods his work often took him to, which awakened his
interest in social issues. Selling lottery tickets was generally tedious and did
not pay well, so that Berkowitz
Kohn soon gave it up and instead decided to learn a skilled
trade. He began training as an umbrella maker.

He eventually gave up his plan to emigrate to the United States of
America. He did change professions and found employment in his
landlord’s dry goods store. A short time later he started his own leather goods
store, which prospered yet also meant hard work from early morning until late at
night. As an independent merchant, he did receive both a Hamburg trade license
and the status of citizen, however. This is how he commented on it: “Me, a
Hamburg
citizen!? Oh, forgive me, my dear homeland, my frivolous
behavior, excuse the hounded wanderer who yearns for peace and seems to get by
without that most sacred sense of duty of the recent past, excuse your orphaned
son if he wants to rest in a foreign fold and wants to pick flowers on foreign
meadows in order to make wreaths to commemorate you.” (p. 98)

Feeling torn between Poland and Hamburg

This quote combines many aspects of Berkowitz Kohn’s difficult
and eventful life. Torn between different countries, forced to flee, and
constantly reminded of his origin, he eventually chose Hamburg as his adopted
home. He later found his political home in Social Democracy, whose socialist
universalism provided him, the “haunted wanderer,” with a solid and
simultaneously cosmopolitan anchor. Initially, he was plagued by a bad
conscience towards Poland, his “dear homeland,” which he
left due to his yearning “for peace”. To make up for this renunciation and in
order to uphold the memory of his place of birth, he became active in Polish
exile associations.

A short time later, Berkowitz
Kohn married Auguste Gabrielsen,
who came from an orthodox family. Having temporarily been estranged from
Hamburg’sJewish congregation, he
was now brought into closer contact with the community by his wife. Instead of
integrating himself, however, he attempted to reform it by writing treatises on
Jewish history and giving lectures. In the 1870s, when Antisemitism directed against eastern European
Jews increased in Hamburg as in other places, unlike many of his fellow Jews, he
did not retreat from public life in order to keep a low profile. Instead he
founded a Polish association, in which Christian
and Jewish emigrants conversed in their native language and discussed the
situation in their former homeland. Berkowitz Kohn served as
head of the association for many years.

Activism in the Social Democratic movement

Moreover, he concerned himself with the increasingly pressing matters of the
“Social Question.” He witnessed the consequences of accelerated
industrialization in the living conditions of Hamburg’s proletariat,
yet he also felt them himself. The invention of new machines meant financial
ruin for many shoemakers, and in the early 1880, it temporarily bankrupted his
leather goods store just after his tenth child had been born. His sympathies for
socialist ideas and Social Democracy grew stronger. Generally speaking, Jews
were active in the Social
Democratic Party in disproportionately high numbers. Their
percentage among Social Democratic members of parliament
was much higher than their percentage among the overall population. And not even
this: Also many of the party’s leading thinkers were Jews. At the time,
Hamburg
became the stronghold of the German labor movement. Its local SPD chapter counted 4000
members in the mid-1870s, which was almost a fifth of the party’s countrywide
membership. Hamburg was also the location of several labor union executive
boards as well as the center of the cooperative movement.

In this environment, Berkowitz Kohn increasingly became active in the “social
movements,” as the excerpt from the source states. Widespread poverty and poor
living conditions among the proletariat had made him aware of the necessity for
a fundamental change in social conditions. He considered political education a
key factor in this effort. He was active in several Workers’ Educational
Associations Arbeiterbildungsvereine and in various cooperatives.
Using his commercial knowledge, he explained larger economic contexts to the
workers: “Upon closer inspection of the new social laws, one soon found in the
union meetings and in the forming of cooperatives, a large field for sowing the
seed of economic education for the working class. In Hamburg’s Old Town and
in Barmbek, I
taught history, accounting, and basic political economy at the School for Workers’ Education
Arbeiter-Fortbildungsverein. I later joined the board
of the Education Association in Eimsbüttel, and I was
able to recruit good teachers of German, Calculus, Writing, Drawing,
Stenography, etc.” (pp.111)

As chairman of a proletarian educational association, he
attracted the attention of the police, who, acting on the Anti-Socialist Law
The “Law against the Publicly Dangerous
Endeavors of Social Democracy,” [Sozialistengesetz] passed on October 19, 1878. of
1878, suspected the association of being a Social
Democratic front. However, state repression was unable to prevent the rise of
Social Democracy in Hamburg or in any other German city. In fact, the Social
Democrats gained a significant number of votes in the course of the 1880s. Party-affiliated
newspapers were established and various workers’ associations were founded while
Hamburg’s labor union movement grew as well.

After the Anti-Socialist Law was repealed in 1890,
Hamburg was
represented in parliament by August Bebel, one of the leading and most influential German
Social Democrats, and Johann
Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz, founder of the J.H.W.-Dietz publishing
house, among others.

Berkowitz Kohn’s
political legacy

The cooperative movement also saw a further boost during this time. In 1899, Berkowitz Kohn took on a leading role in the founding of
“Produktion,” a consumer cooperative and building and savings society, which was
to become one of the most important socialist consumer cooperatives. He remained
active in Hamburg’s labor movement until his death on April 3, 1905. His importance for Hamburg’s Social
Democratic Party becomes evident in the numerous obituaries honoring the decades
of service this Jewish comrade devoted to it. “Vorwärts,” the party’s central organ, was among the papers
reporting his death, and several cooperatives placed death notices in Hamburg’s workers’
newspapers. More than 100 people attended his funeral at the Jewish cemetery in
Hamburg-Ohlsdorf, most of them SPD party members bearing a
red and black flag and several wreaths decorated with red bows. The pallbearers
were Jewish, and the funeral service was held in accordance with Jewish rite.
Despite his decades of service to Hamburg’s labor
movement, Berkowitz
Kohn largely fell into oblivion. His descendants continued his
work, however. His grandson, Reinhard Kohn,
after years of being persecuted and oppressed by the National Socialists, not
only became Senate President of Hamburg after 1945, but, being a long-standing member of the SPD, he also was appointed
deputy chief justice of the Higher
Social Court.

Joseph Berkowitz Kohn’s
memoirs represent a remarkable document for Hamburg’s Jewish
history. His life paradigmatically reflects the migration of eastern European Jews
to Hamburg and
their frequent activism in Social Democracy, labor unions, and cooperatives
during the last third of the 19th
century.

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About the Author

Sebastian Voigt, Dr. phil., is a research assistant at the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich, fellow at the Institute of Social Movements (Bochum) and lecturer at the city's Ruhr-University. His focus of research is: history of labour and union movements, history of antisemitism and history of (anti-) communism.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.